EDUCATIONAL THEORY最新文献

More and more lately, commentators who have defended Socrates have emphasized the extent to which he uses non-rational means of educating his interlocutors, and commentators have downplayed the extent to which he means to offer arguments that provide justification or are rationally persuasive. The trend is refreshing since students of Socrates have often read him as Gregory Vlastos and Lawrence Kohlberg did — namely, as someone who, like Kohlberg, thinks that arguments are all-sufficient. In this paper, though, Mason Marshall suggests that there is a danger of overcorrecting. He points to Plato's Protagoras as a case where, on the one hand, Socrates makes an attempt at rational persuasion, and on the other hand, he does so sensibly. Marshall contends that Socrates's strategy is worth considering for what it reveals about his approach to education and for how it might inform ours.

The debate about the ethics of belief is a classic and it has given rise to wide-ranging debates in epistemology, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, as well as in ethics. In epistemology, the question is what the norms of belief are — should one believe what is true, what is well-evidenced, what is pragmatic or what? — and this question translates, in the philosophy of language, to a parallel question regarding what one should assert. Given that teaching often works through assertion, it deserves to be asked in similar vein what the norms of teaching are, and in this paper Ben Kotzee explores the touchpoints between the ethics of belief, the ethics of assertion, and the ethics of teaching. He examines the ways in which teaching should be governed by the same norms as those that govern belief and assertions. He argues that the strongest contender to be the norm of teaching is a knowledge norm.

In this essay, Ross Collin offers ethics-focused readings of Anton Chekhov's popular short stories “The Schoolmistress” and “The Teacher of Literature.” Chekhov shows in the two stories how teaching can inhibit teachers' flourishing. That is to say, teaching under bad conditions can draw teachers into moral “catastrophe,” to use Cornel West's term for an idea central to Chekhov's work. In “The Schoolmistress” and “The Teacher of Literature,” Chekhov compares the catastrophes of teachers' lives to the catastrophes of the lives of nonhuman animals trapped in an eternal present of toil or display. Confined in lives they do not control, the teachers in Chekhov's two stories cannot link their pasts, presents, and futures into narratives they might live out and steer in different directions. Here, Collin shows how works of art can attend to particularities of moral experience, including teachers' moral experience, that are difficult to recognize and address productively using general concepts in philosophy.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought the importance of vaccination and public attitudes toward it firmly to the fore. However, vaccine hesitancy and refusal remain significant barriers to global uptake, with post-pandemic declines in routine immunization contributing to disease outbreaks worldwide. Research shows that education plays a vital role in vaccination acceptance. But, while vaccine hesitancy is higher in those with lower education levels, in affluent countries, vaccine refusal is more prevalent among the highly educated. This suggests it may stem from epistemic vice rather than mere ignorance. Furthermore, not all concerns about vaccination are due to wrongheaded scientific beliefs. Some involve moral or religious claims about which seemingly reasonable people disagree. Given these complexities, should teachers promote vaccination? If so, should this extend beyond scientifically evidenced propositions to include the moral and civic virtues of immunization? Drawing on recent philosophical work on teaching controversial issues, Ruth Wareham argues that teachers are warranted in promoting both the scientific case for vaccine safety and efficacy and the moral case for vaccination qua civic duty. Indeed, she maintains that the case for teaching vaccination directively is particularly defensible since robust arguments can be made for it using either of the two most plausible positions on delineating and teaching controversial issues — namely, the epistemic criterion and the political criterion — as well as a pluralist approach that seeks to combine them.

Whether open-mindedness (OM) counts as an admirable epistemic aim of education has been a surprisingly contentious matter. Skeptics point out that OM is only contingently truth-conducive and that open-minded students may be maladaptive to the hostile epistemic environment outside school. Here, Seunghyun Lee contends that, while these critiques are not without merit, they overlook the possibility of epistemic inhospitality within classrooms, and so mischaracterize the significance of open-mindedness in education. Viewing malicious forms of credibility influence — namely from echo chambers and epistemic preemption — as a serious deterrent against our educational efforts, Lee argues that these epistemic practices point to the necessity of open-mindedness in education and, simultaneously, to its difficulty. He concludes by analyzing and offering potential strategies for classroom-based instruction.

Closed-mindedness is a characteristic trait of irresponsible believers. For this reason and others, educators should actively discourage closed-mindedness in their students. One way to do this is to cultivate its opposing virtue: open-mindedness. Drawing on the work of William Hare, Danielle Diver defends the status of open-mindedness as an epistemic virtue and explains why it is truth-conducive, even in epistemically hostile environments. Diver goes on to argue that open-mindedness is fundamental to the practice of philosophy and that teaching philosophy in schools, especially through the methods of Philosophy for Children (P4C), is an effective way to cultivate open-mindedness in students. Teaching philosophy therefore has a valuable role to play in the education of responsible believers.

For at least half a century, there has been a broad consensus that indoctrination is a pernicious form of miseducation and a distinctive vice of teaching. In recent years, a number of educational theorists have sought to cast doubt on this view. They suggest that the attention traditionally given to the threat of indoctrination, and the anxiety induced by it, are significantly misplaced. Here, Michael Hand distinguishes three forms of indoctrination skepticism — the impossibility objection, the unavoidability objection, and the desirability objection — and argues that all three miss their mark. A fourth challenge to the standard view — the third-party objection — does not downplay the threat of indoctrination but does deny that it is a distinctive vice of teaching. Hand contends that this objection too is unpersuasive and concludes that the standard view is the correct one.